At a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists conference this past week, CBS’ Rachel Scott asked former President Donald Trump about the racist attacks on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her a “DEI candidate” or “DEI hire.”
Trump didn’t answer the question. Instead, he launched into another line of attack. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris is both, as a person of mixed race. But facts and understanding complex identity are not really the point, says Alvin Tillery, founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. Tillery also does polling and is actively supporting Harris.
“I think he’s a performance artist,” Tillery says of Trump.
Tillery says it’s a performance with a point. “He got the media covering and re-articulating his birtherism 2.0 theory.”
If birtherism 1.0 used Obama’s Blackness and his father’s identity as an African immigrant to call into question Obama’s legitimacy, this new attack, with Harris’ birth certificate circulating online, implies that she is not legitimately Black enough.
On the surface the two birtherisms may seem contradictory, but Tillery says they are really the same thing.
“It's an automatic racist response.” Tillery says. “This is just essentialist thinking.” In other words, he says it’s thinking that race is something inherent, even biological. He points out that race is constructed through culture and society. It is not fixed; it wanders, he says, and being mixed race is sometimes proof of that wandering.
“It's also white supremacy saying ‘We can define you. You don't get to define yourself,’” Tillery says.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says Trump and many of his followers use race as “simply a tool, and they will wield the tool in any fashion that makes sense to them,” even if it seems contradictory on the surface.
He notes that for the past few years the GOP has been pushing color blindness in its opposition to DEI and affirmative action on the one hand, while pushing racist conspiracies on the other.
“Why would the head of the Republican Party start to weaponize race for himself to be the arbiter of defining whether Kamala Harris is Black or Indian, when in fact the Republican Party is supposed to be moving America to an assimilationist future where race doesn't matter?” Muhammad asks.
“Because that's not a future they actually embrace,” he says. “They embrace a future that reflects the past of white nationalism, of white essentialism, and of xenophobia.”
A xenophobic message for some Black voters, too
But Trump's message at NABJ was not just aimed at a white audience, Muhammad says. He believes it was also targeted to what Trump thought some Black people wanted to hear.
“Donald Trump is trying to persuade a number of marginal black voters that they should not think of Kamala Harris as one of them,” Muhammad says.
The narrative that Harris isn’t Black is not new. Attacks on Harris’ identity first gained some prominence in 2019 when Harris was running to be the Democratic nominee. Some pointed to the fact that Harris may have had an ancestor who was a slave owner to say she was unqualified to speak for Black people. Historians note that many descendants of enslaved people carry the names and the DNA of slave owners due to rape and sexual violence.
Harris’ Black ancestry comes from her immigrant Jamaican father. She attended Howard University, an HBCU, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a prominent Black sorority, but some argue she is not connected to Black Americans because she is not descended from enslaved people in America. Donald Trump Jr. amplified this claim on Twitter before deleting it.
Tillery says the distinctions between Black immigrants and Black descendants of American slavery have been important and nuanced in the debate around who should receive reparations. California’s reparations project, for example, is aimed only at the descendants of enslaved people.
But Tillery says some have taken those distinctions and turned them into divisions, especially some that have come together under the hashtag #ADOS — which stands for American Descendants of Slavery. Critics say that ADOS draws too stark a line around who gets to claim Blackness.
“ADOS has such a pointed view of who is eligible for reparations or redistributive policies in the United States that it mostly divides Black people,” says Muhammad.
Muhammad says whether intentional or not, Trump is “weaponizing ADOS' iconoclastic and divisive politics around issues such as reparations.” He says it’s a brilliant strategy that pairs with the anti-immigrant rhetoric Trump used at NABJ, telling the room that "criminals" were coming over the border to take their “Black jobs.”
"He did try to move it towards the policy issue, which is to say, 'I'm going to tap into Black xenophobia because I know it's real. I've heard it,'" Muhammad says.
It’s a strategy of divide and conquer, he says.
“What is clear is that for the Trump campaign” Muhammad says about ADOS, "is they're the perfect bus to hitch a ride on in terms of dividing the Black community or sowing enough confusion within the Black community.”
“But” he adds, “Black people don't only vote for a person because they're Black.” They also vote for policy.
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